Sold! The board has accepted Iseman's $22.5 bid to become the next owner of 8W.

Looking to wow the board of 907 Fifth Avenue? A high-paying job in finance seems to be just the ticket.

The board has accepted Frederick Iseman’s $22.5 million bid to buy the park-facing eighth-floor apartment that belonged to late copper heiress Huguette Clark—one of the three in the building. Mr. Iseman made the bid in mid-summer, after the board reportedly blocked Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani’s move to snap up both of Clark's eighth-floor apartments to create one the largest floor-throughs on Fifth Avenue.

The deal, sources have told The Observer, will give Mr. Iseman not only the entirety of apartment 8W, which was asking $19 million, but also a piece of 8E. It's unclear what will become of the remainder of 8E, which one broker deemed the more charming of the two spaces, even if it lacks a park view. Apartment 8E, listed with Brown Harris Stevens brokers Mary Rutherfurd and Leslie Coleman for $12 million, has been off the market for several months.

Will the new 8E, minus the chunk annexed by Mr. Iseman, return to the market? After all the dust has settled, we expect it will. It was Clark's most modest holding in the building, but it was no shrinking violet. The 12-room apartment boasted a 47-foot-long windowed gallery opening up onto a 29-foot corner living room, a library, a reception room and a formal dining room (plus two palatial bedrooms).

Maybe the breather isn't necessarily a bad thing? It will take at least one season of summer work hours (and quite possibly more) before Boaz Weinstein—who bought Clark's 12th-floor penthouse for $25.5 million this July—or Mr. Iseman move into their new apartments, but the building might feel out of balance if all three of Clark's old apartments were suddenly occupied.

After all, the apartments sat empty and echoing for years but for Clark's enormous doll collection after the eccentric heiress took up residence at a hospital for the treatment of a mysterious, and likely imaginary, illness.

A few more million for Clark's heirs to squabble over. Clark's estate, estimated to be worth some $400 million, is being administered by the New York County public administrator. Her relatives (she had no children) have already filed a lawsuit to reclaim some of the $44 million in gifts that Clark gave her extensive entourage of lawyers, doctors and nurses in the decades before she died. In the wise of words of Biggie Smalls, mo' money, mo' problems.

kvelsey@observer.com

The heiress in 1989. (New York Magazine)

The problem with getting what you want is that sometimes, once you have it, you don't want it anymore. The Observer has learned that Libet Johnson is looking to offload the Vanderbilt Mansion, the stately neo-Georgian mansion at 16 East 69th Street that she spent $48 million to buy scarcely more than a year ago.

Sources tell us that Ms. Johnson has been quietly shopping the townhouse around, hoping to sell for a price in the mid-$50 million range. Which does not come as a huge surprise—the heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and the sister of NY Jets Owner and Romney bundler Woody Johnson has a reputation for falling in, and out, of love with extravagant real estate. She bought the townhouse, sans broker, from her friend and fellow heiress Sloan Lindemann Barnett and Ms. Barnett's husband, the founder of beauty.com. What's a $48 million townhouse between friends?

The Vanderbilt Mansion.

So what new gem caught the heiress's avaricious eye? Sources familiar with the matter have told us that Ms. Johnson fell hard for Huguette Clark's eighth-floor apartments at 907 Fifth Avenue, but lost the late copper heiresses' spread to private equity chief Frederick Iseman. The Central Park-facing apartment and a few rooms of the smaller apartment are currently in contract for $22.5 million. Mr. Iseman, the CEO and chairman of CI Capital Partners, is still awaiting board approval. And you know how those can go, so no doubt Ms. Johnson has her fingers crossed.

One broker expressed disbelief that Ms. Johnson would want an apartment in 907 Fifth—which the broker sniffed was not the kind of A-type building the heiress usually goes for—but we suppose Ms. Johnson felt a kind of kinship with Clark  and her estate, even if the socialite Johnson and the reclusive Clark would appear to have little in common other than their vast family fortunes. More likely, Ms. Johnson was just looking for something new to occupy her time.

As far as the Clark apartments go, the ranks of the rebuffed grow more illustrious by the day—Ms. Johnson joins Qatari prime minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, whose $31.5 million bid for all of both apartments in May was reportedly rebuffed by the board.

Will Ms. Johnson be able to sell the Vanderbilt mansion and make a little money in the process? The Stanford White mansion at 973 Fifth Avenue—a gilded age truffle of a townhouse—sold $42 million in June, and it required major refurbishment. But before Ms. Johnson swept in last May, the home had been lingering on the market for some time at $48 million. And while brokers say that the 1881 home and its Peter Marino-designed interiors are lovely, they note that it's rather dark inside and the brick facade less elegant than that some of the city's top limestone townhouses.

At the time of the sale, it ranked as the most expensive deals since the recession hit and the most expensive townhouse since J. Christopher Flowers set the previous record with his purchase of the Harkness Mansion for $53 million in 2006. Last year, Larry Gagosian scooped up the place for $36.5 million.

And it's not even the only townhouse that Ms. Johnson, or at least her family, is trying to sell. A five-story West Village townhouse at 85 Perry Street, owned by Falconer LLC., a oft-used screen for Libet and her close kin, has been publicly listed since May with Stribling's Pamela D'Arc. Falconer is apparently extremely eager to be rid of the townhouse, dropping the $13 million ask to a mere $9.96 million this August.

Surely this is precisely the kind of situation where one's rich friends might come to the rescue and buy at least one of Ms. Johnson's real estate holdings?

kvelsey@observer.com

According to the records, she ended up with exclusive lifetime use of the co-op. But before that happened, according to the first deed, Mr. Iseman actually began by buying out her stake for $5 million. Then over the next three deeds he transferred ownership to trusts run by his family. Mr. Iseman will also be paying his ex-wife five convenient yearly sums, adding up to about $10.5 million, according to the agreement attached to deeds. (After The Observer contacted Mr. Iseman for comment, copies of that agreement were deleted from city records.)

The furnishings get distributed democratically. Two paintings of women (one by Sir Joshua Reynolds) and a French 18th-century chair will be sold off, and the proceeds divided. Things become much more interesting from there: She gets the den lamp for six months—then it goes to him; six silver shells in the living room and four Venetian boxes in the library are split up equally.

That leaves 26 other items to be divvied up over a monthlong span, from a Raphael tapestry in the library to “2 Blue Jars with Lids in Living Room,” plus, of course, a bedroom painting called Allegory of Vanity. “Any items on which the parties cannot agree,” the deed says, “shall be listed and divided by alternating choices with coin flip determining who has the first choice.”

Aside from losing the co-op, things are looking up for Mr. Iseman. In November, that $125,000-per-year ex-secretary, Fatima Monahan, was indicted for stealing over $43,000 from him. (At the time of her lawsuit, which has been stayed, his lawyers maintained that Ms. Monahan had made up her salacious charges after getting fired for theft.)

The indictment says she used her boss’s credit card to buy, among other things, kitchen utensils; more glamorously, according to the separation agreement, the Isemans’ silver tray came from 19th-century Nigerian chief Nana Olomu, who defied British imperialists and was deported.